Monthly Archives: December 2014
Federations and Health Care Spending
In putting together my material for my fiscal federalism course next term, I decided to take a look at some health spending figures for the OECD countries in order to compare federal with non-federal countries. Federal structures generally try to combine the economic advantages of a more centralized state with some of the welfare and […]
FTPL: a federal or provincial issue?
[Apologies for the title. It's a Canadian joke, about our fixations, that can be told various ways, but always ends with the punchline: "Elephants: a federal or provincial issue?"] Does fiscal policy affect the price level? If so, are we talking about federal fiscal policy only, or are we talking about provincial fiscal policy too? […]
Who would ever lend to an FTPL government?
Think back to philosophy class: Would you ever believe the promise of an Act-Utilitarian? No. An Act-Utilitarian will perform action A if and only if action A will maximise the sum of expected present and future utilities. His past act of having promised to do A is not a reason for the Act-Utilitarian to perform […]
Currency is alpha; bonds are beta
If you understand the title you understand the post. It's obvious really. Betas peg their exchange rate to alphas; alphas do not peg their exchange rates to betas. Beta's promise to redeem their liabilities for alpha liabilities at a fixed exchange rate; alphas make no such promise the other way. So alphas lead and betas […]
The degeneracy of FTPL
Consider a corporation that earns a flow of (real) profits S(t). Assume for simplicity the corporation finances itself by issuing only shares (it does not issue bonds). Let the stock of shares be M(t). Let the reciprocal of the share price be P(t), so the share price is 1/P(t), and so the total market value […]
Principal-agent problems and level-path targeting
Suppose you hire an agent to do a job. The agent's level of production p depends on the agent's effort m and on a mean-zero shock from nature s. So p = m + s. You observe p, but you do not observe m or s. Your agent observes s and p only after he […]
My failed attempt to model longevity, retirement, and secular stagnation
We don't normally publish our failures. But perhaps we should. Because we can (sometimes) learn as much from our failures as from our successes. Academic economists spend a lot of time trying to model things. One reason we do this, and a good reason for doing this, is as a check on our imperfect intuitions. […]
Stabilising deflation under the gold standard
We can learn from history, but we need to be careful about the lessons we learn. If the historical monetary policy regime is different from today's monetary policy regime, stabilising deflation in history might be destabilising deflation today. Put the price level P on the vertical axis, and real output Y on the horizontal axis. […]
Economic Superiority
Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan have penned a Max Plank SciencesPo discussion paper on the traits of the economics profession. In The Superiority of Economists, the authors write: “Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists’ objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority […]
The desired stock of savings
Isn't a concept we talk about much in macro. Which is a bit weird, when you think about it. And it's always good to examine the way we think about things, and teach those things. We talk about households' desired flow of saving, and firms' desired flow of investment, and we talk about the actual […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments